No abstract

To inform intervention development in a multisite randomized community trial, the Rapid Early Action for Coronary Treatment (REACT) project formative research was undertaken for the purpose of investigating the knowledge, beliefs, perceptions, and usual practice of health care professionals. A total of 24 key informant interviews of cardiologists and emergency physicians and 15 focus groups (91 participants) were conducted in five major geographic regions: Northeast, Northwest, Southeast, Southwest, and Midwest. Transcript analyses revealed that clinicians are somewhat unaware of the empirical evidence related to the problem of patient delay, are concerned about the practice constraints they face, and would benefit from concrete suggestions about how to improve patient education and encourage fast action. Findings provide guidance for selection of educational strategies and messages for health providers as well as patients and the public.

Confined masonry walls represent one of the most widely used construction systems for dwellings in Peru and other Latin countries. This study describes the procedure for implementing a database with a web interface of results collected from the experiments conducted over the years by the Japan Center for Earthquake Engineering and Disaster Mitigation. This paper attempts to contribute to the seismic design procedure of this type of structure, and parameters such as stiffness ratios and the deformation (drift) for the characteristic stages of confined masonry walls under different limit states or performance levels are proposed. Also, a semi-empirical equation for estimating the shear capacity using the database is proposed.

Reinforced concrete (RC) buildings in Peru use low ductility walls, with rectangular cross-sections and reinforced with wire mesh and vertical reinforcement bars at boundary ends, as structural elements. These structural elements have no columns, have small amounts of reinforcing bars and are expected to fail in a brittle manner. In this study, a performance verification test is conducted on the use of carbon fiber sheets (CFS) as a retrofitting method for shear walls without boundary columns. The focus is on retrofitting walls that fail in flexural mode. In other words, although an increase in strength cannot be expected, CFS retrofitting can delay the concrete crushing of the shear wall base that occurs during flexural failure; and the aim is to verify this improvement in deformation performance due to CFS retrofitting. From the test, by retrofitting the RC shear wall without boundary columns with CFS, it was found that postmaximum strength deterioration was more gradual, and deformation performance was improved. And Ultimate limit deformation of specimen which was partially retrofitted at the boundary ends of the wall was larger than that of specimen which was retrofitted over the entire wall span.

In order to protect buildings against earthquakes that are categorized as "common" according to the Peruvian Earthquake Resistant Standard, a prototype of Recycled Rubber Seismic Isolator ("RRSI") was developed in the structural laboratory of the Japan-Peru Center for Earthquake Engineering Research and Disaster Mitigation - CISMID, Peru. The raw material used to manufacture this device was recycled rubber tires; the rubber tire was cut into square shape sheets with 190mmx190mm of cross-section and a total thickness of around 11 mm. Rubber tire sheets were joined to each other by a vulcanization process, including rubber layers with 3mm of thickness made of recycled rubber tire powder in between rubber tire sheets; and in between the rubber tire sheet and the steel plate at both ends of the bearing. Two specimens were tested in a shaking table under a free vibration impulse or displacement in order to get their natural vibration frequency, natural period, and inherent damping. Then, to obtain the hysteretical behavior, a cyclic lateral reversal-loading test was conducted on three different specimens applying a constant axial load of 330MPa, 270MPa, and 220MPa respectively and a lateral displacement pattern with different levels of shear deformations up to the failure, which occurs at a shear strain of around 100%. From the experimental results, a nonlinear hysteretic behavior and energy dissipation were observed, decoupling the lateral movement. Finally, a numerical model was proposed to model the nonlinear hysteretic behavior of the RRSI based on a Modified Bouc-Wen model. This numerical model was simulated by using the specimens as base isolators for buildings.